“Oh Mr. Merrit! Really?”
“You see, they have so much more color.”
“Yes. I can see that.” She gazed upon the mob. “How primitive these people are,” she murmured. “So primeval. So unspoiled by civilization.”
“Beautiful savages,” suggested Merrit.
“Exactly. Just what I was thinking. What abandonment—what unrestraint—”
“Almost as bad as a Yale-Harvard football game, isn’t it?” Merrit’s eyes twinkled.
“Well,” Miss Cramp demurred, “that’s really quite a different thing, you know.”
“Of course. This unrestraint is the kind that is hostile to society, hostile to civilization. This is the sort of thing that you and I as sociologists must contend with, must wipe out.”
“Yes indeed. Quite so. This sort of thing is, as you say, quite unfortunate. We must educate these people out of it. There is so much to be done.”
“Listen to that music. Savage too, don’t you think?”
“Just what had occurred to me. That music is like the beating of—what do they call ’em?—dum-dums, isn’t it?”
“I was just trying to think what it recalled,” mused Merrit with great seriousness. “Tom-toms! that’s it—of course. How stupid of me. Tom-toms. And the shuffle of feet—”
“Rain,” breathed Miss Cramp, who, since her new interest, had deemed it her duty to read some of Langdon’s poetry. “Rain falling in a jungle.”
“Rain?”
“Rain falling on banana leaves,” said the lady. And the gentleman assented, “I know how it is. I once fell on a banana peel myself.”
“So primitive.” Miss Cramp turned to Mrs. Dunn, who sat behind and above her. “The throb of the jungle,” she remarked.
“Marvelous!” exhaled Mrs. Dunn.
“These people—we can do so much for them—we must educate them out of such unrestraint.”
Whereupon Tony and Nora appeared laughing and breathless at the box entrance; and Tony, descendant of Cedrics and Caesars, loudly declared:
“I’m going to get that bump-the-bump dance if it takes me the whole darn night!”
“Bump the what?” Miss Agatha wondered.
“Come on, Gloria,” Tony urged Mrs. Dunn. “You ought to know it, long as you’ve been coming to Harlem. Mrs. Byle gives me up. You try.”
Mrs. Dunn smiled and quickly rose. “I’ll say I will. Come along. It’s perfectly marvelous.”
“Furthermore,” expounded J. Pennington Potter, “there is a tendency among Negro organizations to incorporate too many words in a single designation with the result that what is intended as mere appellation becomes a detailed description. Take for example the N.O.U.S.E. and the I.N.I.A.W. There can be no excuse for entitlements of such prolixity. They endeavor to encompass a society’s past, present and future, embracing as well a description of motive and instrument. There is no call you will agree, no excuse, no justification for delineation, history and prophecy in a single title.”
“Quite so, Penny,” said Mr. Dunn. “Mrs. Byle, may I have this dance?”
“Certainly,” said Nora, smiling a trifle too amusedly.
“We’re going home after this one,” growled her husband as she passed.
Miss Cramp said in a low voice to Merrit: “Isn’t he a wonderful person?”
“Who?” wondered Merrit.
“Mr. Potter. He talks so beautifully and seems so intelligent.”
“He is intelligent, isn’t he?” said Merrit, as if the discovery surprised him.
“He must have an awfully good head.”
“Unexcelled for certain purposes.”
“I had no idea they were ever so cultured. How simple our task would be if they were all like that.”
“Like Potter? Heaven forbid!”
“Oh, Mr. Merrit. Really you mustn’t let your prejudices prevail. Negroes deserve at least a few leaders like that.”
“I don’t know what they’ve ever done to deserve them,” he said.
Unable to win him over to her broader viewpoint, she changed the subject.
“Mrs. Byle is very pretty, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“She is so light in complexion for a Negress.”
“A what?”
“A Negress. She is a Negress, isn’t she?”
“Well, I suppose you’d call her that.”
“It is hard to appreciate, isn’t it? It makes one wonder, really. Mrs. Byle is almost as fair as I am, while—well, look at that girl down there. Absolutely black. Yet both—”
“Are Negresses.”
“Exactly what I was thinking. I was just thinking—Now how long have there been Negroes in our country, Mr. Merritt?”
“Longer than most one hundred percent Americans, I believe.”
“Really?”
“Since around 1500, I understand. And in numbers since 1619.”
“How well informed you are, Mr. Merrit. Imagine knowing dates like that—Why that’s between three and four hundred years ago, isn’t it? But of course four hundred years isn’t such a long time if you believe in evolution. I consider evolution very important, don’t you?”
“Profoundly so.”
“But I was just thinking. These people have been out of their native element only three or four hundred years, and just see what it has done to their complexions! It’s hard to believe that just three hundred years in our country has brought about such a great variety in the color of the black race.”
“Environment is a powerful influence, Miss Cramp,” murmured Merrit.
“Yes, of course. Chiefly the climate, I should judge. Don’t you think?”
Merrit blinked, then nodded gravely, “Climate undoubtedly. Climate. Changed conditions of heat and moisture and so on.”
“Yes, exactly. Remarkable isn’t it? Now just consider, Mr. Merrit. The northern peoples are very fair—the Scandinavians, for example. The tropic peoples, on the other hand are very dark—often black like the Negroes in their own country. Isn’t that true?”
“Undeniably.”
“Now if these very same people here tonight had originally gone to Scandinavia—three or four hundred years ago, you understand—some of them would by now be as fair as the Scandinavians! Why they’d even have blue eyes and yellow hair!”
“No doubt about that,” Merrit agreed meditatively. “Oh yes. They’d have them without question.”
“Just imagine!” marveled Miss Cramp. “A Negro with skin as fair as your own!”
“M‑m. Yes. Just imagine,” said he without smiling.
XI
The comments of the occupants of nearby boxes would have been illuminating to J. Pennington Potter’s party, the box, for example, containing Cornelia Bond’s guests. Among these were young Dr. and Mrs. Peter Long, Mrs. Hermie Boston, Conrad White, who was a writer of stories about Negroes, and Betty Brown, his fiancée. Miss Cramp would have found their comments vulgar, unforgivable of Con and Betty, who
